I/O scheduling explained

Input/output (I/O) scheduling is a term used to describe the method computeroperating systems decide the order that block I/O operations will be submitted to storage volumes. I/O Scheduling is sometimes called 'disk scheduling'.

Purpose

I/O schedulers can have many purposes depending on the goal of the I/O scheduler, some common goals are:

To guarantee that certain requests will be issued before a particular deadline.

Implementation

I/O Scheduling usually has to work with hard disks which share the property that there is long access time for requests which are far away from the current position of the disk head (this operation is called a seek). To minimize the effect this has on system performance, most I/O schedulers implement a variant of the elevator algorithm which re-orders the incoming randomly ordered requests into the order in which they will be found on the disk.

Common disk I/O scheduling disciplines

Random scheduling (RSS);

First In, First Out (FIFO), also known as First Come First Served (FCFS);